Essays

Essays | Winter 1992
THE SECOND COMING OF THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN

Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Until very recently, there were fie engineers. These experts only two views of the American molded suburbs for cars, not suburb: You either loved it or people, a catastrophic mistake hated it. In the first camp were whose costs we can measure to- most suburbanites; in the second day in traffic congestion, in air were most writers, planners, and pollution, and in the vast sums of architects. Now a public money lav- new group of crit- ished on roads ics h...

Essays | Winter 1992
BACKGROUND BOOKS

KGROUND BOOKS

THE SECOND COMING OF
THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN
City and town planning is not a profession that many parents would encourage their children to enter. Especially since the disillusionments of the 1960s, the profession has fallen into pop- ular and intellectual disfavor. One recent his- tory, Diane Ghirardo's Building New Commu- nities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy
(Princeton, 1989), even suggests that the inten- tions of New Deal town builders were little dif- ferent from t...

Essays | Winter 1992
Affirmative Action And The American Creed

Seymour Martin Lipset
o achievement of 20th-cen- tury American politics sur- passes the creation of an enduring national consen-sus on civil rights. This consensus was forged dur-
ing the past quarter century a civil-rights
movement that compelled Americans fi-
nally to confront the wide gap between
their treatment of blacks and the egalitar-
ian values of their own cherished national
creed.
In recent years, however, the leaders of the civil-rights movement have shifted the focus from the...

Essays | Winter 1992
Affirmative Action And The American Creed

Despite the great civil-rights triumphs of the 1960s, the politics of race once again occupies center stage in American life. Yet what appears to be a conflict between blacks and whites, Seymour Martin Lipset argues, is more a struggle between the American public and the nation's political elite over the true meaning of equality.

Essays | Autumn 1991
Columbus and the Labyrinth of History

History has not been the lumbus. Such, it seems, is the fate of histori- same since Christopher cal figures whose deeds reverberate Columbus. Neither has through time. he been the same The Columbus story surely confirms the throughout history. axiom that all works of history are interim
During the five cen- reports. What people did in the past is not

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tunes since his epochal voyage of 1492, Co-preserved in amber, a moment captured lumbus has been many things to many peo- and immutable t...

Essays | Autumn 1991
BACKGROUND BOOKS

COLUMBUS LABYRINTH
Historians treat it as axiomatic that each new generation, by building on past scholarship, knows more than those that went before. By this logic, we must know more about Columbus than scholars did in 1892 during the fourth Centenary. Unfortunately, that is not the case (or at least it was not 10 years ago).
Popularly, much lore that was common cur- rency about Columbus a century ago has been lost, and, in scholarship, few American histori- ans now specialize in the sorts...

Essays | Autumn 1991
Woodrow Wilson,Politician

ew presidents in American his- tory elicit more mixed feelings than Woodrow Wilson, And why not? His life and career were full of contradictions that have puled historians for 70 years. A victim of childhood dyslexia, he be- came an avid reader, a skilled academic, and a popular writer and lecturer. A deeply religious man, who some described as "a Presbyterian priest" with a dour view of man's imperfectability, he devoted himself to secular designs promising the triumph of reason and...

Essays | Autumn 1991
The 'Other' Europe At Century's End

When the Soviet Union loosened its grip on Eastern Europe in 1989, observers of the region tempered euphoria with caution. Would the national and ethnic conflicts that have long plagued the region resurface now that the communist lid was off? Would the challenge of rebuilding collapsed economies prove overwhelming? As we approach the second anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, historian John Lukacs uncovers some surprising developments in the "other" Europe.

Essays | Autumn 1991
RESEARCH REPORTS

Bard College's Jerome Levy
Economics Institute, June 18-19, 1991. Authors: Susan E. Mayer and Christopher Jencks
The late 1970s and '80s are widely seen as hard times for poor families. While the aver- age American family's real in- come rose 11 percent be- tween 1979 and '89, for example, the real income of families in the bottom fifth fell by four percent. The poverty rate increased from 10.5 per- cent to 11.4 percent.
But all these figures are mis- leading, contend sociologists Mayer, of the...

Essays | Autumn 1991
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

a group of more self-interested "movers and shakers.'
WQ AUTUMN 1991
2,1

Max Holland

n August 1964, presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote Lyndon Johnson a spare but revealing memorandum. The Republicans had just nominated Barry Goldwa- ter in San Francisco, rejecting if
not humiliating the Rockefeller-led, inter- nationalist wing of the party. Bundy sensed a golden opportunity for LBJ to court the "very first team of businessmen, bankers, et al." orphaned politically by Gol...

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